Volkswagen: Action Learning and the Development of High Potentials

Abstract

WHEN I met Richard Davis, he was an investment banker and he had been working with Morgan Stanley for the best part of the last two years. He was a little over 24 years old and he looked exactly that age. It was in one of the overcrowded Northwest lounges of the Davis terminal in Detroit. We were both waiting for a Dallas connection and we started chatting. I was in the middle of a benchmarking study focused on the development of high potential managers for the Volkswagen Group and he was flying to some remote place in Texas where he would meet with the CEO and with the CFO of a health food processing company. ‘To analyze their assets’ he told me, ‘in order to see whether we would consider buying them.’